The present invention relates to labels and more particularly to the manufacture of labels including lenticular lenses.
Lenticular lenses are known and used in the printing of advertising and promotional materials, packaging labels, hang tags for merchandise, product tags, and security labels. Lenticular lenses are thin, transparent lenses that are flat on one side and include a plurality of parallel, linear, side-by-side lenticules—elongate, convex lenses—on a second side. Typically, an image is printed on the flat side to create a visual effect of zoom-in, zoom-out, steroscoping, three-dimensional sequencing, or movement of the image when viewed through the lenticules. The combination of a lens and an image is referred to as a lenticular assembly.
Lenticular assemblies are manufactured in a continuous web with the lenticules being parallel to the longitudinal axis of the continuous web. In one manufacturing process, concave machine guides fit over the convex lenticules as the web advances to ensure exact registration between images printed on the flat side and the lenticules.
In a popular application, the web of lenticular assemblies is applied to a web of transfer tape on a release liner or carrier web. The adhered lenticular assemblies and tape are die cut to create a continuous web of pressure sensitive lenticular labels. The resultant product is a continuous web of lenticular labels having the lenticules oriented parallel to one another and the length or the longitudinal axis of the web.
The resulting web of lenticular labels suffers a number of shortcomings. Most significantly, the orientation of the lenticules extending the length of the label web governs the orientation of the desired visual effect. Specifically, as a result of the lenticules' orientation, the intended visual effect on the continuous label web may be viewed in only two ways; (1) by rotating the continuous web along an axis parallel to the length of the web, and (2) by moving the web so that a viewer's sight line moves across the width of the web, that is, perpendicular to the length of the web.
When labels are applied from the resulting web to objects, such as bottles, using conventional labeling equipment, the lenticules are oriented circumferentially on the object (i.e. perpendicular to the height of the object). Consequently, the visual effect occurs only when the viewer and the labeled object move vertically relative to one another. Because continuous lenticular assemblies are available only with lenticules parallel to the direction of travel, the conditions under which the visual effects occur have been limited.